Fox News Anchor Tucker Carlson Says Hollywood ‘Had To’ Let ‘Moonlight’ Win Because of Political Correctness

‘That’s the Law, There Was Really No Way Around That’ 

Tucker Carlson says Hollywood “had to” let Moonlight win the Oscar Sunday night, out of political correctness. The Fox News anchor made a guest appearance on Fox & Friends Monday morning as the show’s mock “Oscars expert,” and proceeded to claim the choice of Moonlight was a “foregone” conclusion, somehow appearing to suggest the reason for the post-midnight mixup during which for a few seconds La La Land had been announced the Best Picture winner was all an effort to steal the award and give it to a film starring Black actors that held an LGBT theme.

“Moonlight had to win because you knew what the film was about. And that’s part of the problem with Hollywood,” Carlson actually said on-air.

“Well, finally something interesting happens at one of these dumb award shows,” Carlson said as he began his critique. “And it couldn’t happen to better people.”

Conservatives in recent years have boycotted or otherwise trashed Hollywood and its films and shows like the Academy Awards because of their perception that most of the industry is very liberal.

“And you knew it had to happen, because Moonlight had to win,” he continued, as The Daily Beast reports. “That’s the law, there was really no way around that. This was a foregone conclusion, because it’s not just a good movie, ‘it’s an important movie,'” he said, in a mocking tone. “It’s a movie that instructs you, that changes you morally. And that’s kind of the aim of Hollywood—is not just to entertain, but to instruct.”

Failed Republican Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum for a short while headed a far right wing Christian film studio that made movies not just to entertain, but to instruct. Conservatives own the corner on so-called think tanks that produce false or misleading materials to “instruct” people on how to think. When it comes to propaganda, conservatives own the market.

Carlson, by the way, perhaps is best known for being half of CNN’s Crossfire, which was canceled in 2004 after Daily Show host Jon Stewart appeared on the program as a guest and destroyed any shred of credibility the “news” hour, and Carlson, had.

Monday, Carlson, in his critique of the film and Hollywood added, “the second you feel a political imperative it destroys your art,” and called filmmakers who try to “elevate” the country, “overbearing and pompous and boorish.”

ThinkProgress took issue with Carlson’s claim that Moonlight “had to” win, saying “Carlson’s statement is patently false. If the honor rewarded political correctness — a euphemism for minorities’ inclusion — perhaps people of color wouldn’t have been erased for decades by the Hollywood establishment and LGBTQ people would’ve been celebrated instead of overshadowed by white, cis men who portrayed them onscreen.”

ThinkProgress concludes: “What’s most troubling about Carlson’s argument, though, is the inherent assumption that black and queer experiences aren’t a standard. To be black and queer is to live on the margins. They are experiences that only exist in the realm of politics, where “others” try to assert themselves and be heard. They aren’t mainstream or deserving.”